Richard, the speaker would HAVE to be smarter than either of us think. He had the votes but did not bring the bill to the floor initially in fear of the wingnuts. It will be interesting to see if Republicans will now try to govern or if the wingnuts will demand a pound of flesh because Boner, er...

I don't diagree that action is needed. The problem is that if one side is willing to let things collapse rather than compromise, there can be no solution. Republicans remain fixed. Obama and Democrats are the ones accused of caving in to opponent's demands. How do we break the Republican...

So, bottom line, as they say? Follow the money, and then see for yourself how closely are your ACTUAL interests aligned with those being promoted and served. The answers are quite stark and should be alarming to anyone paying attention.

Well, it's not completely silly, just overblown. Private e-mail typically means that the e-mail is going to be stored by Google, Yahoo, Earthlink, or some other ISP. (The Clinton's have more than enough money that they might easily have their own personal e-mail server, but I don't know...

The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings. The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive.

The murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov: “The investigation is considering several versions,” the statements said. The first it listed was: “a murder as a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country, where the figure of Nemtsov could have become a sort of sacrificial victim for those who stop at nothing to achieve their political goals.” Putin has said he will "personally oversee" the investigation.

GOP Anti-vaxxer: Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican.....chair of a key congressional subcommittee on science and technology...responding to a woman who asked whether he'd be looking into...if the (CDC) had covered up information linking vaccines to autism. He responded with a rather unscientific personal anecdote: "I believe it's the parents' decision whether to immunize or not…Most of our children, we didn't immunize. They're healthy."

The culture wars continued: Avijit Roy, whose Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog championed liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation, attacked along with his wife in Dhaka...Roy, said to be around 40, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004. Hardline Islamist groups have long demanded the public execution of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to combat writing critical of Islam....